Swiss Alps drama

When she was 8 years old, Ursula Meierspotted a young thief at an Alpine ski resort up the hill from her hometown near the French-Swiss border. Three decades later, an image of the boy popped back into Meier's head as she wrote the screenplay for "Sister," which opened Friday in San Francisco.

"It's funny, because I'd already started writing the script when I woke up one day and suddenly the memory came back to me," Meier recalls. "I went, 'Oh my God, that little boy was in my sub-unconscious somewhere all along.' "

The writer-director recalls, "Seeing this kid who has no friends, who's forbidden from going into the restaurant at the ski resort - it captured my imagination. I wondered to myself, where are his parents?"

Meier's fictional response centers around 12-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein). He survives by stealing skis and sandwiches from wealthy vacationers at a luxury Alpine resort. Simon sells the equipment to pay rent on a grungy apartment that he shares with a 26-year-old slacker, Louise (Léa Seydoux).

The film's mountain setting appealed to Meier because it drama- tized the contrast between haves and the have-nots, she explains. "You have this industrial plane at the bottom of the mountain, and if you follow the smoke from the factory up into the air, you arrive at another world. A very rich world. I was fascinated by this verticality."

"Sister," Switzerland's entry into the foreign film Oscar race, offers no background on its peculiar lead characters. "I wanted this to feel more like a fable or fairy tale," Meier explains.

She also skipped standard plot twists. Meier notes, "It's so easy if you run out of inspiration to create a scene where you go, 'Ring ring, hello, this is the social worker!' We didn't want that kind of thing because even though 'Sister' starts out like a social film, it goes in another direction when you learn the truth about the relationship between Simon and Louise. At that moment you feel it becomes more of a love story between these two characters."

Documentary uses S.F. networking site to travel the world

In the film, the German-born Stotz uses Couchsurf as a resource to travel the world. Along the way, she explores the daily lives of a British environmentalist, a Mali music fan, a Japanese wildlife enthusiast, an ecologist in the Palestinian West Bank and a Brazilian dancer, among others.

"Global Home" will be screened Sunday at Landmark's Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and Friday and Nov. 20 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

Poor kids are chess masters in 'Brooklyn Castle'

The kids featured in "Brooklyn Castle" had it tough enough when documentary maker Katie Dellamaggiore first began hanging out with junior high school chess champions from one of New York's poorest neighborhoods. Then it got worse.

Dellamaggiore says, "We met the team before the economy melted in 2008. At that time they were fully funded. We expected to follow five kids through the school year to their last big chess tournament. We never expected that a couple of months into shooting the school would be hit with this $1 million budget cut." When after-school programs got slashed, the I.S. 318 junior high no longer paid travel expenses for the chess team's out-of-town competitions "Those budget cuts actually expanded the scope of the film," Dellamaggiore says.

"It opened my eyes to what was happening to schools all across the nation. I began to dig deeper, talked to folks who were lobbying for after school funding and reached out to groups like the After School Alliance. They craved a story like this so they could put a face on the budget cuts."

The film's stars embody an empowering theme, according to Dellamaggiore. "How much money you have or where your parents are from - all that outside stuff can be left off the board when you sit down to play chess.' " {sbox}